


a story for wandering things (unlost)

by the_cosmos_lonely (dheiress)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Disassociation, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Love in its Skeletal Form, M/M, Memory Loss, Multi, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28041921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dheiress/pseuds/the_cosmos_lonely
Summary: “Tell that other ghost visiting you I said hello,” the man calls out, making Jon whirl around again just to see him tipping his body out of the window, his coat flapping like loose wings blacker against the black night sky.Jon’s mouth makes a stillborn noise of a hysterical shout. He thinks of rushing towards the window to look, to see the inevitable tragedy on the sidewalk but decides against it, bewilderingly comforted by the fact that whoever, whatever, the man is, his body doesn’t make a sound when, if, it hits the ground.(There are two ghosts visiting this makeshift library Jon is making, one a metaphor and the other an actuality.  It’s just his usual rotten luck that he falls in love with both.)
Relationships: Georgie Barker & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 33
Kudos: 150





	a story for wandering things (unlost)

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, thank you to [ThatOneGirlBehindYou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatOneGirlBehindYou/pseuds/ThatOneGirlBehindYou) and [flashhwing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashhwing/pseuds/flashhwing) who tolerated me barging into their inboxes weeks ago to scream about this spooky flirting of a fic and then held my hand as I sob incoherently about it.
> 
> Second, on the relationship tags. This was written with jongerrymartin in mind but due to the nature of the storytelling most of the gerrymartin happens off-screen. Maybe one day I'll write a companion fic with them chilling in the same house one floor apart because they're totally just spooky bros. Maybe.
> 
> Lastly, [*throws you this mood playlist*.](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/50nyJucVHpppI6V0dWSmOK?si=EQUt-MKMTyqrfMQUgovAbQ)
> 
> 20/12/14 EDIT: Playlist updated with some lovely recs from [viv_is_spooky.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/viv_is_spooky/pseuds/viv_is_spooky)
> 
> 21/02/24 EDIT: *screaming* look, look at this [art](https://singersalvageart.tumblr.com/post/643955524581441536/a-story-of-three-ghosts-inspired-by-a-story-for) made by [@singerslvgart](https://twitter.com/singerslvgart/status/1364275068105277446?s=19)

There are two ghosts visiting this makeshift library Jon is making, one a metaphor and the other an actuality. 

It’s just his usual rotten luck that he falls in love with both.

* * *

The house, the _shop_ , the house that got turned into a shop and which Jon will now turn back into a house一library...thing, is not that large. With a width only a few inches past seven feet and a steep staircase eating away one-third of the entire hallway leading to a cramped kitchen and smaller bathroom, the only favourable thing about this old house-shop is that it has two storeys and an attic. 

Jon first steps into the building one chilly Thursday morning, the sparse trees littering the street shuddering a bit with the October zephyrs in the same way the dark-stained wood door groans as it opens for him. The knob is cold beneath his skin, the wood the texture of something coarse gradually smoothened down by weather and time. Distracted, his fingers trace over the worn letters of the brass plaque hanging lopsidedly on the door, his eyes mapping the house in front of him. 

His house now, he supposes, though that is still something his mind cannot fully wrap itself around no matter how many times he looks at the deed. Even now, Jon finds himself expecting to wake up one breath later his current one and scoff at the silliness of this dream scene. Why would he buy this house with _this_ kind of history of all houses? Why would the Institute even bequeath such a large separation fee to him? _Why would_ 一

His fingers convulse against the cold metal plate.

There is a musty smell permeating the air inside the house, the one he often fondly associates with the mildew of old books. Somehow though, this one feels less like books and more like the stagnant breath of a dying man caught in his final exhalation, unsaid words still choking his throat. 

Jon shakes his head, trying to free it from the thoughts.

The floorboards croak a low moan as Jon is urged in by the cold snapping London winds. He glances down and wonders what kind of secrets lie beneath his feet this time. Termites, he frowns at the thought, maybe even worms一

He shakes his head again, not letting the thought dig in, then ganders at the dark intricately patterned mouldings on the ceiling to expel it further. The little hairs on each inch of his skin rise and a shiver run down from his left ear down to his spine and toes. 

Jon would never remember why he felt that shiver that day, the realisation hiding in a corner of his mind it was certain Jon would never go in. 

It’s just that.

This is an old house with old walls of stained, peeling paint, with old floorboards gritty with dust and the rotting of time. 

And yet. 

No spiders, not even the semblance of a cobweb. 

* * *

(How do you separate people from living ghosts?)

* * *

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” the man says, his little piercings glinting impossibly in the weak light of London’s October dusk filtering through the grimy window. He’s staring at the small brass plaque Jon has taken from the dark-stained wood door downstairs and used as a temporary paperweight for the sheaves of paper he unearthed from one of the inner rooms. Jon’s instinctive reply to him is to survey the bare wood floors with uneven colour patches and the grey walls stripped of its worn wallpaper, trying to see which part of it could even be considered _better_. 

Then, like an afterthought Jon hears his mouth form the words, “you shouldn’t be here. This is private property.”

The man, probably Jon’s age though the artificially dyed black hair makes it hard to be certain, just shrugged, his long, dark leather coat rustling with the movement, “you should haven’t left the door open, then.”

“I didn’t,” Jon says, faintly as he tries to remember if he did. He always keeps doors closed ever since一

_Always._

He, the man in the dark coat and with little black metal studs adorning his paper-white skin like an inverse of the night sky, the man whose face for some reason Jon feels he should _know_ , just smiles at him, a thin line of pale lips whose ends curl ever so slightly up, and asks, “Then, how did I get in here?”

* * *

“What are you going to name it?” Georgie asks three sips into their impromptu drinking session in the hallway leading to the staircase. Jon hasn’t bought any kind of table yet, thus they make do on a freshly dusted cot retrieved from one of the bedrooms as if they were once more college students in love with each other and ready to take on the world. It’s only the ring on her finger and the scars on his body, both silver and perfect circles against their dark skins, that reminds him it’s not and never will be again.

“Maybe I’ll just keep the original name,” he thinks out loud, staring at the cheap red wine inside the cheaper beer glass.

She bumps her shoulder against his as she slides further down the cot to place her head on the crook of his neck, scrunching her nose, “Not very catchy, is it?”

He scoffs, leaning his head against the top of hers. Her hair smells different the same way his probably does. 

“No, it isn’t.”

“Hm.” 

In a motion practised through years, they sip their cheap red wine simultaneously, Jon from his beer glass and Georgie straight from the bottle. They both make a sound of distaste. Georgie’s head lifts to inspect the label.

“Oh god, this is so cheap.”

Jon barks a laugh, dry and unused on his throat. It still makes her smile, though, deep dimples on her smooth cheeks. She sits up completely and hovers over him, one hand stroking his cheek. They breathe out, twin exhales from two different sets of lungs both tasting of the same inexpensively sweet wine.

“I’m proud of you,” she says, half of her face hidden from him by her thick black hair, “I’m proud that you saw reason and got out of there in time.”

Jon understands what she means but he can’t help but think of Tim’s bleeding hand slipping from his as the ambulance takes him away and Sasha’s scream only heard through the thick static of a tape left forgotten on the ground. 

Tim’s arm around his shoulder. 

Sasha pronouncing ‘Calliope’ wrong. 

Skin and voice, more memories for a mind already unspooling to lose too. 

And一

“Have I really,” he asks, feeling his tears only when her thumb wipes them away, “Have I really gotten out of there in time, Georgie?”

* * *

Martin visits him in the dead of the night. 

_Visit_ is a strong word because what happens is that Jon wakes up feeling eyes crawling all over his skin, not unlike the feeling one gets with swarming ants. Something he hasn’t felt since一

Something he thought he’ll never feel again. 

Also, he needs to relieve his bladder.

Jon walks hurriedly down the staircase, not even bothering to turn on the light as he guides himself with one hand gliding down the bannister and the other feeling along the wall, the incident with the paintings ignored but not forgotten. He would have missed him entirely if he hadn't grudgingly accepted Georgie’s suggestion of replacing the wooden front door with a more aesthetically pleasing thick frosted glass door or if the streetlights outside had decided not to work the night shift as it were wont to do the past few weeks. But he did and they hadn’t so when Jon looks up absent-mindedly at the door upon nearing the landing, his eyes are immediately drawn to the fuzzy silhouette backlit by the yellow street lamps outside.

A fuzzy yet familiar silhouette that has his body forgetting its nightly rituals and sprinting instead to the door to pull it open.

He doesn’t know which one of them is more surprised when the outrageous little bell Georgie’s fiancée dared him to use chimes like a laughing child but it’s Martin that speaks first after the long silence following the trailing echoes of the high-pitched laughter.

“Um,” he starts, rubbing the back of his neck nervously like he did when they still一

“ _Hi_ ,” is what he settles on, smiling down at Jon’s bare feet with the same small smile he always makes.

As if Jon _hadn’t_ 一

As if _Martin_ hadn’t一

There is a multitude of things Jon wants to say, things that he _needs_ to say. 

What, how, _why._

But all his stupid mouth does is stupidly hang open as he clutches the frosted glass door for support, both knees and tongue seizing up.

The freckles seem like blood splatter on Martin’s rosy cheeks. Jon’s hand curls tighter around the cold metal knob as the old wood beneath his shifting feet groans their dissent. It feels like the wrong thing to fixate on it but after一

After _everything_ , how could Martin’s cheeks still be rosy like it has always been?

“Jon, are you okay?” Martin asks, blue eyes flitting up and down Jon’s face, “You look pale like you’ve seen a一”

_A ghost? Really?_

“Did I scare you,” Martin says, eyes downcast again before he takes a deep breath, “am I scaring you?”

Jon, a bad liar, badly lies, “ _No._ ”

* * *

The body is a temple, the soul its faith. 

The body remembers certain things in ways neither mind nor heart can comprehend. 

The body is flesh, bone, and sinew; a machine of organic parts that begins to rot the moment it leaves the waters of its mother’s womb.

(The body is not the entirety of a person, it is known.) 

* * *

He finds the CDs on a Thursday afternoon. 

All morning, he has been procrastinating replying to Rosie’s email by clearing out the old shelves in the room Jon dubs ‘Bedroom #2 - For Future Consideration of Gothic Romance/Horror Section’. The CDs一most of them labelled with names like ‘Black Veil Brides’, ‘My Chemical Romance’, ‘Slipknot’, ‘Siouxsie and the Banshees’ in strong, blocky handwriting一are all uncased and stacked haphazardly in the left drawer of a floating shelf where a rusting speaker sits atop. 

The speaker doesn’t play anymore when Jon tries it so he finds himself popping one of the discs randomly into the portable CD player he has discovered in the kitchen cabinet yesterday and has taken to bringing around the house with him like a concussed pet. The left headphone is broken, only hissing out vague static that could be considered drums if Jon strains his imagination so he flattens his left ear on the wood floor of the bedroom instead, right next to the detritus he cleared out from the other shelves in this room. Pressing ‘Play’, Jon settles his body comfortably on the floor, letting Slipknot scream at his right ear as the floorboards’ thrum fills his left. 

He closes his eyes, meaning to let himself unwind for a minute from the hanging anxiety the thought of having not replied yet to Rosie’s emails brings. But he must have drifted off longer because the next thing he knows it's Siouxsie and the Banshees crooning in his ear and there, mere three feet away from his face, is a pair of black army boots tapping against the floor to the beat of the song.

It’s the man, the one with an unfamiliar yet cognisable face with paper white skin and black earrings and blacker hair, still bundled in the same long, leather coat as before. He’s balancing himself on a large pile of ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’s一from the seventh to eleventh editions一as both his elbows rest on his knees, his lean arms connecting up to gloved hands holding its owner’s clean-shaven cheeks. 

His blue eyes so blue, staring straight at Jon.

There’s a moment, or a few, where Jon just blinks up at him, just watches his mouth, those thin pale lips from which black metal beads hang like the shiny seeds of a forbidden fruit, form the same words blaring at his right ear.

_By hook or by crook_

_You'll be first in his book_

_For an impaled affair_

Then, Jon rips the headphones from his ears, giving himself vertigo as he rapidly sits up.

With his ears cleared, he finally hears what the man is saying. 

“You locked your door,” the man says and Jon glimpses silver on his tongue.

“I did,” Jon breathes out, his fingers spasming with an emotion he has forgotten, “how did you enter this time?”

“You didn’t lock your window,” he sings as he tucks back strands of his dyed hair behind his pierced ears, “you’ll freeze to death in here if you’re not careful.”

He points at the window behind Jon and Jon decisively does not look. There’s only one anyway, a rectangular sliding window with grimy glass panes, rusting muntins and a chipped rail that almost sliced Jon’s hand open when he tried to crack it open. There’s a buzzing on Jon’s tongue, sitting like something teetering between fear and... _not_ fear.

“There are outcropping bricks on the wall hidden by ivy, they can be used as footholds to climb up to the window. You really should lock the window.”

“I closed that window, locked it.”

The man huffs a laugh, rough and unused, “No, you _didn’t_.”

Jon’s flesh finally stops trembling and he bites out, “I ought to report you to the police.”

The man leans forward and fiddles with the old player speaker as if it were a piano, “You could but I don’t recommend it. Believe it or not, they have an actual procedure on how to deal with complaints concerning me.”

“Do I know you,” Jon snaps.

“Yes,” the man replies, the curl of his ‘y’ overlapping with the tail end of Jon’s question, “but not yet.”

The man taps his nose then gestures again at the window with pursed lips.

And Jon, he hears the curtains rustle a teasing whisper first before he feels the nippy autumn breeze play with his hair. Jon’s head whips towards the window and then he stares, first unseeing, then uncomprehending.

The unyielding window he could never open is now unlatched, haphazardly thrown agape as the white chiffon curtains Georgie picked out to cover it softly dance with the chilly air.

Behind him, a metallic click echoes, and then the rusty speaker blasts into life.

_By hook or by crook_

_You'll be last in his book_

_Of flesh oh so rare_

* * *

Jon calls Tim’s phone every Friday at one in the afternoon.

It achieves nothing, Jon knows. At this point though it has become a rote thing that marks the passing of hours for Jon. A notch, a tick of the clock’s hand, a cross in a calendar. A ritual for time that waits for no one, least of all, for Jon.

He dials Tim’s number and listens.

_Hi, this is my voicemail. Sorry, I’m not available right now, I’m probably out on a date with the gorgeous Ms. James._ A laugh of another voice, each ha like water dropping onto cool stones, _In your dreams, Stoker._ Tim’s laugh rolling like a rushing river, then Jon’s voice一he thought it professional then, flat and smooth like Elias’ but hearing it now again he just sounds so...young一 _Tim, can you please make a more professional voicemail._ When he was recording, Tim had puckered his lips at Jon’s direction at this point but only a slight sucking noise is heard on the phone, interrupted by a new voice, different from the first three and indignant on Jon’s behalf, _Tim_ 一

The voicemail’s beep is a deafening shrill tone Jon listens through. He ponders on what to say. ‘ _How are you’_ would be a good start. ‘ _I’m sorry’_ is a better one, though. _‘I regret asking you to follow me’_ is still true but Jon now recognises the passive accusation he never meant to say, that he didn’t even have, lurking in there. _‘Sasha is gone’_ is also true, but they both knew this already the moment another person, another _creature_ , answers them in her voice.

_‘Martin is gone too’_. Especially in the way it matters most.

Jon keeps his mouth shut, letting dead air into his lungs and the phone’s microphone. 

It’s not like Tim would hear this anyway.

* * *

The old volume is still lying on the newly bought table, still cracked open to the chapter titled 'Unfinished Businesses', the yarn string he used as a temporary bookmark still stark red against the yellowing pages. The only difference is that now there's a big hulk of Martin in his crocheted green cardigan sitting on the chair in front of it, blue eyes scanning the greying words intently.

Jon freezes, ridiculously feeling like an intruder caught in his own kitchen.

He considers loudly clearing his throat, or rapping his knuckles on the door frame, or just turning back and climbing up his room to sleep the headaches away. Before he could decide on what to do, Martin turns to him, his large hand running through his red, glistening red, curls and his blue, so very blue, eyes widening at the sight of Jon.

“I would have knocked,” Martin says, a guilty look on his rosy freckled face as both he and Jon freeze like a tableau, “but, but the door. It’s, uhm, it was already ajar and for a moment I thought一for a moment, I was…”

He breathes, deep, and Jon sees translucent wisps of fog curling out of his lips.

“I was _afraid_. You shouldn’t leave your door open like that, Jon.”

Sasha used to tease Martin, _you know your freckles redden when you lie, right?_

His freckles are pinpricks of blood on his cheeks, Jon half-expects each of them to burst and vermillion tears to pour forth. 

_Cherry angiomas,_ Tim used to tut over it, _have you had them checked yet, Marty-o?_

Jon’s mouth doesn’t say anything, and Martin stutters on in the face of his silence.

“I’m- I’m sorry, I just. I would have made tea but, you know how it is,” he motions vaguely at the air next to him.

“I haven’t bought any tea yet.”

Martin chuckles, trying for a lopsided grin that turns halfway into a grimace, “That too.”

Jon turns away from him. There’s a sense of safety, no matter how false, at not seeing the things that shouldn’t be here, the things whose existence of nonexistence upsets you the most.

He pads towards the front door, silent as the floor of this house is treacherous enough to swallow his steps but not those he needs unheard. The door is closed but unlocked, static fills Jon’s ears at this sight and he hurriedly takes out the headphones to ram it onto his ears before plunging back his hand in the baggy pocket of Georgie’s donated pyjamas to press play on the portable CD player sleeping there. 

In his right ear, Gerard Way sings about yesterday’s love he doesn’t feel any more as in his left, the floorboard’s creaks filter through the crackling.

_One._

_Two._

“ _Jon_ ,” Martin says, a disembodied voice pleading behind him, “I’m sorry. I just一”

Jon’s hand closes into a fist around the player. He fixes his eyes on the painting he had hung on the front door, regardless of protestations from both Georgie and Melanie about how it destroys the whole modern minimalist aesthetic. It’s just supposed to be a block, a cover behind which his eyes can hide from the moving shapes of outside life, arbitrarily picked out and then never given another spare thought. Jon only realises its subject as he stands there, attempting to school the entirety of himself into a modicum of calmness. 

It does fit with the motif of the other paintings that littered the house一oh apologies, the _shop_ 一when Jon took over. A hyper-realistic picture composed of intricately minute abstract patterns, it depicts a woman, blindfolded, her skin and yellow hair almost blending seamlessly with her creamy dress. Her paleness is only contrasted by two things: one, the uneven redness of her blindfold; and two, the small pool of vermillion in the centre of the platter she’s holding, the same hue as the cloth loosely wrapped around her eyes, where the dismembered eyes sat somehow still exuding the sensation of observing the viewer back.

Saint Luciana. Or was it Saint Lucia? Saint... _someone_.

Add the knowledge of her to the list of things slipping through the cracks of Jon’s mind.

“Why are you still here, Martin?” In another time, in another world, that would have been said with poorly kept impatience but that kind of Jon is dead in this time, in this world, its remnants just a wraith living in the lungs of a man trying to make a shitty library out of a shitty rare used books shop nevertheless half-filled with its previous owners’... _possessions_.

_Unfinished businesses._

Someone breathes behind Jon, a faltering rush of air, not unlike the crisp October wind filtering through a window that should haven’t been opened. 

“I, I just- it’s just,” another breath sputtering out, a candle flickering in the wind, “they finally found the bodies.”

Jon’s fingers spasms again, hitting ‘Pause’ on the player. The static is still there in his ears but more of a hum now rather a scream. 

“They- _it._ It was messy, very messy. I didn’t know it was that messy. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

There is a burning in Jon’s lungs spreading up to his eyes.

“Nothing worse than what happened to you, Martin.”

Martin says nothing to that.

Jon walks back to the kitchen, his eyes kept on his feet.

The old volume is still lying on the newly bought table, still cracked open to the chapter titled 'Unfinished Businesses', the yarn string he used as a temporary bookmark still stark red against the yellowing pages. 

There’s a box of teabags next to it.

* * *

The soul is a hissing snake, the body its glass container.

The soul warps and changes shape with time, for better or for worse.

The soul is the ghost of memories, of emotions living in the rotting, cursed flesh it was imprisoned in from its birth.

(The soul is the person, it is said.)

* * *

The brain forgets things. Most times on accident, like an unused path taken over by weeds until there is no path left to traverse at all. But sometimes on purpose, like a mother covering their child’s eyes from the horrors of the world. 

Is it too... _insensitive_ of Jon, if he actively mourns the loss of knowledge rather than the other palpable losses?

He can be forgiven, one can suppose, for even the dreams come fragmented now.

The scent of old paper, his eyes feasting on words, his mouth transcribing horrors.

_The squelching noises, something not meant to burrow under your skin making a loving home out of your still-living flesh._

An arm around his neck, a playful wrestling Jon always loses.

_The warmth of Tim’s hand on his wrist, tugging urgently._

“Here you go! More deets on the _mysterious_ teenager from the Harold Silvana case.”

_The echo of a body falling to the ground followed by a metallic clang._

A green crocheted sweater draped next to four mugs of steaming tea.

_The sight of terrified blue eyes wide open, bloodlike freckles on the pale cheeks below._

Jon wakes up and sees twin blue moons set upon an ivory sky bedecked by glistening black stars staring at him. 

“This is a nightmare,” Jon groans, throwing the threadbare Ghost Hunt UK merchandise blanket off him as he sits up.

The man, sitting on the open window’s sill with his long black coat half-open to reveal a Black Veil Brides shirt that is a replica of the shirt Jon is currently wearing, laughs a short, rough sound, “If you want it to be.”

“I mean,” he continues, shifting to cross his legs, unheeding of the danger that is the open window behind him, “you do know you’re being _haunted_ , right?”

Jon pushes himself up, standing on sleep-wobbly legs, “Who isn’t being haunted by one thing or another at this point?”

“You’re awfully mouthy for someone who just woken up.”

“Thanks,” Jon replies, dry, “I aspire to be.”

Jon’s fingers run beneath the cot, feeling for the matchbox and the candle he stuffed in there because electricity in this house is unreliable at best and straight-up messing with him at worst. He finds both nearer the middle of the bed than he remembers placing them. 

A match is struck, a candle lit, a figure by the window illuminated by something warmer than the moonlight.

“Why are you still here?” is not the question Jon means to ask but it’s the one that slips out even as he walks towards the window, candle in hand.

Jon stops a foot away from the worn toes of a black combat shoe propped on a torn jeans-clad knee. Even when sitting down, the man doesn’t have to tilt his head much to look him in the eyes. 

Jon’s throat abruptly dries up. 

Better question, what is _Jon_ doing?

“Curiosity,” The man says, blue eyes not leaving Jon’s face, “I wanted to know, I guess.”

“ _Know_ what?”

Jon brandishes the candle in front of the man’s face, self-assured in the ingenuity of his flaming sword of wick and wax. Any sane human fears fire even just a little and if the man happens to be... _another_ , well. Immolation works in most instances, right? 

He only realises his blunder when the man catches his wrist, swiftly adjusting his hold such that his palm is curled around both candle and Jon’s hand. The man’s hands are both ungloved. It must be the candle, Jon will think and decide on later though at the moment he is thinking quite the opposite, that makes it seem the man’s skin on the side of uncomfortably warm.

“Sometimes the places we don’t even think about much, sometimes those places turn out to be just the thing we’re attached to.”

In the flickering light, Jon notices the eyes tattooed on the knuckles. 

“So I wanted to know.”

“Know _what,_ ” Jon grits out as the man’s thumb moves across the back of Jon’s hand as if it were striking the flint wheel of a Zippo lighter, the heat from the contact point of the man’s skin and his racing up his arm to set his face alight.

There is another kind smile on the man’s pale lips, shadows for dimples on his cheeks, “ _You._ ”

Jon manages to wrench his hand from the man’s grip and quickly recoils four feet away from the man on the window, scalded. The cheeky smirk blooms wider, at least that is the last thing Jon sees before he veers towards the bedroom door to hide the quivering of his hands.

“Tell that other ghost visiting you I said hello,” the man calls out, making Jon whirl around again just to see him tipping his body out of the window, his coat flapping like loose wings blacker against the black night sky.

Jon’s mouth makes a stillborn noise of a hysterical shout. He thinks of rushing towards the window to look, to see the inevitable tragedy on the sidewalk but decides against it, bewilderingly comforted by the fact that whoever, _whatever,_ the man is, his body doesn’t make a sound when, _if,_ it hits the ground.

Instead, he takes a deep breath and blows the candle out.

* * *

It's the act of uncapping the pen.

The files do not even resemble the Institute's official paper, they're not the creamy, thick white sheets stamped with the faint owl's silhouette exactly a quarter of an inch from the bottom and left edges. Just normal legal-sized paper slipping out of a long manila envelope. It does not bear the elegant handwritten loops in glistening red ink Jon has grown familiar with over the years, but the dry, sharp grey letters keyed in from an ageing typewriter. 

And yet, it’s as if he were一

_“While I do enjoy seeing you so engrossed in paperwork, don’t you think it’s time to go home, boss?”_

_“Uhm, Jon? Accounting sent these down for you. Departmental budget and all that, I think?”_

_“Seriously, Jon, that’s your signature? I can’t even see any ‘J’ in there!”_

And yet.

Melanie is the one who discovers him, sitting in his makeshift office and staring blankly ahead with his pen still uncapped and papers still unsigned. Apparently, she has been ringing the laughing victorian child doorbell for a good solid ten minutes before trying the door and finding it unlocked. She had gone ahead of Georgie to bully him supposedly into buying coffee to drink with the cake a fan had sent for the anniversary of Georgie’s podcast. 

But Jon learns these later, all he remembers for now is that he was going to sign the last of the papers he needs to sign and suddenly Georgina is there in front of him, shaking him softly.

“You’re free now,” Georgie whispers, her forehead resting on his, her breath warm and sweet fanning across his cheeks to soothe his scalding tears.

“ _Free_ ,” she repeats as if it were a blessing.

Freedom can be a lot of things but it can never be freeing with the weight of the things you lost to earn it.

* * *

The sight of the cupboard door creaking open stirs a fear in Jon’s mind he thought he has long since buried. It stays his whole body, locks it in a diorama of a man leaning on his kitchen table, tea mug halfway raised to his mouth in a mid-drink, trepid eyes watching the little door that he locked and never opened _crick, crick, crick_ open. 

"Do you even know what's haunting you?"

His head whips towards the other end of the table. And what does it say about him? That he finds himself relaxing at the image on the opposite side of the table, at Martin, still red-faced and red-cheeked, perched on the rickety chair meant for a person much smaller than he is. There’s a mug of steaming tea sitting in front of him, ceramic blue stark against pale clasping fingers. A thumb flits across the mug’s chipped handle as if it were flicking a Zippo lighter open. 

Jon’s throat closes and he looks down to his own tea.

_Haunting._

_Hunting._

_Hurting._

Three entirely different words, and yet if one of the other is used instead, Jon's answer would still be the same.

His fingers tighten around the tea mug's handle.

"It doesn't matter."

"It doesn't-? It doesn't matter?" Martin repeats, a deeper flush creeping up from his neck to his round ears and then staining his freckled cheeks, suppressed anger or indignation, or both, suffused into his tone. 

The last time Jon heard Martin sound like this was when he got treated to a diatribe about the importance of spiders to the ecosystem. Jon’s shoulders droop with the reminder as a larger part of him readies for the incoming lecture. 

Martin simply deflates though, Jon knows despite not looking at his way as the anger or indignation, or whatever it is that Martin is feeling, empties out, leaks out of him like a thin stream of hissing cold air that curls around Jon’s ankles.

“You’re right. _Sorry_. It doesn’t matter. _He doesn’t_. That isn’t what I’m here for.”

A thumb pressing on the chipped edge of the handle as the other four curls in tighter around the curve.

“Pray tell then, _Martin_ , why are you here?”

A side-eye, pretending not to notice the reddening cheeks and the freckles that pop out brighter at that. This feels normal, drinking tea and pretending Martin does not exist一Jon's heart stutters. 

“ _Christ_ , Jon, sometimes you are such a一”

But he peters off in a huff and flaps his hand at Jon’s direction instead.

“Such a _what_ ,” Jon asks, actually curious.

They never voiced out what they actually think about him, haven’t they? 

Not even Tim. 

Not that Jon gave any of them a chance to before.

Martin’s head shakes and he opens his mouth. But whatever word he’s going to describe Jon in is drowned out by the shrill, tinny laughter of the electronic doorbell.

The front door groans open shortly after and Jon hears Georgie and Melanie straining to open it fully. He should help them, he thinks, he had hefted the box against the door almost absentmindedly earlier. He just didn't want to think about it, he supposes. Rosie's familiar handwriting on the label has him freezing at the sight already and taking out the mugs, all still the same matching ceramic blue as he last saw them, evoked such burning sensations in his eyes.

Tim's joke. Four novelty mugs saying world's best grandmother; adding an 'archivist' between best and grandmother on one, and completely striking out the words 'best grandmother' and replacing it with 'hottest assistant' on the other three with wobbly strokes in Tipp-Ex. 

_You're no fun at all,_ Tim whines at him when all Jon did was accept the gift with a dry, _thank you for the wonderful mug, Tim._

Jon had used it every day since.

Sasha had slapped some thermochromic stickers on hers while Martin's was involved in some accident that had Jon in apoplexy at how close it was to spilling hot tea onto the Nunis papers. The handle was chipped but Martin had kept using it.

“Oi, Jonathan Sims,” Melanie calls. They managed to pry the door open and slip through. Melanie is stomping towards the kitchen with her arms laden with bulging Tesco bags while Georgie is toeing around the box at the front door.

“Jon, your... _package_?”

“Don’t mind it,” Jon replies, eyes flitting at Martin who has started fiddling with his own tea mug, lips pressed in a tight line that curls at the edges _just so_ , “just walk around it.”

Georgie does and she bumps on the open cupboard door on her way to the kitchen but does not close it. 

“That’s all of your stuff you left there then?” she asks, her eyes scanning the kitchen table empty except for the three empty blue mugs matching the one in Jon's hands.

Though heavy, the box contains just a few items considering the time he had worked there, just four stacks of his notebooks from when he was in Research, spare clothes and the hygiene kit he kept when he was mostly sleeping late nights in the Institute. 

There's also a tape recorder there. Jon hasn't touched that one yet.

Jon’s thumb flicks across the blue mug’s chipped handle, muscle memory from a long ago habit. 

The hair clips, the spare yellow shirt with hot red chilis pattern, and the green crocheted cardigan are not his.

“And some.”

The cupboard door behind Melanie and Georgie closes silently, and Jon finds his eyes transfixed on those fingers, skin of delicate paper white and knuckles marked with eye tattoos, pulling at it from the inside.

* * *

The heart is both a metaphor and an actuality.

The heart is a living organic mechanism, ever pumping ichor through God’s supposed greatest invention that is the human body.

The heart is a symbol, something to refer to the incomprehensible collection of thoughts and emotions from which every action, either knowingly or not, derives from.

(The heart makes a person, this we all like to believe.)

* * *

It's not the doorbell's fault, Jon knows that.

If only simply knowing something can settle the heart.

The sad remains of the doorbell lie on the palm of his outstretched hand. 

Jon stares at it unblinkingly. 

Why did he do that? 

And more importantly, where should he put this mess?

Should he keep it? Melanie will probably look for it.

He looks to the hallway behind him and his eyes land on the small brass doorknob of the cupboard under the stairs. Jon considers it for a moment, thinking of knuckles with eye tattoos even as his feet strides towards it. The knob turns easily under his free hand and with a soft click the door opens.

The cupboard is empty.

Well, not quite entirely. 

On the bottom left layer, there’s an unlit candle next to a pocket book一hm, no. Not a pocketbook but a book meant for a child’s hand. Jon picks the small book first, thumbing it open to its first page.

_Booklet of Knowledge,_ it says. No author. A strand of pure blonde hair, longish, floating out from where it was tucked in between the pages as Jon exhales.

He closes the book and pockets it, reaching for the candle next. It’s smooth, pale yellow, about six inches long. Suspiciously, it looks like the last of the candles they found under the sink and which had somehow mysteriously disappeared from under his bed.

“Thought I could read the book again, it’s one of those that slipped through the cracks. Mum made me finish it for my sixth birthday.”

The man sits on the steps right above the cupboard door, an unlit cigarette between his lips. A conspiratorial smile lights his face as Jon gazes up at him.

“Your Martin and I made a deal. I’m supposed to keep to the upstairs as he dawdles here downstairs. I agreed because it’s not like it’s any skin off my back. I get the feeling he doesn’t like me much,” the grin widens, “but I bet I can change that soon.” 

A thrum rings through Jon’s body, a taut chord plucked with relish.

“You saw Martin?”

He takes the cigarette out of his lips and blows nonexistent smoke at Jon’s direction.

“Yeah. What a peculiar ghost Mr. Blackwood makes, don’t you think, Jon? He _breathes_ so much.”

He doesn’t know what made it so, but the name comes to him as if he’d known it forever. As if he’d poured countless hours reading and reading stories about him, trying to decode a man that no longer exists.

“I think you of all people, Mr. Gerard Keay,” Jon says, barely a breathe above a whisper, “should know that ghosts can be breathing people too.”

“Haven’t you figured it out yet? Gerard Keay is dead,” the man with dyed hair, blue eyes, and a paper-white sky of a face adorned with black stars, _Gerard Keay_ , simply replies with a self-deprecating smile, “Besides, I prefer friends to call me Gerry.”

“Is that what we are,” Jon asks, inexplicably tired, “ _friends?”_

Why does this word feel like a taboo on his tongue?

“You’re sleeping in my room, listening to my CDs, and wearing my shirts, also don’t forget that you’re renovating my mum’s bookshop into your private library,” he chuckles, wry, “I think friends is a good label to start with, don’t you think?”

“It’s not like you’re still using them,” Jon retorts, unable to keep the childish defensiveness out of his voice as he crosses his arms over the _My Chemical Romance_ logo on the black tee-shirt he’s wearing.

There’s a sudden sharpness to the man’s silhouette but as quick as it happens the angles soften back into loose lines like an exhalation.

The man, _Gerry_ , looks steadily at Jon. His eyes are so blue. _God,_ why are they so blue?

“Fair enough.”

Jon turns away from him, walks towards the door still clutching the bell and the candle; the bell and its ripped wires like exposed intestines in his right fist, the unlit wax candle on the verge of breaking in his left. The book, heavy in his pocket.

He should open the door, run out of this house. Jon should do a lot of things. But his feet stop a few inches shy of threshold and firmly plant themselves on the floor, the only solid part of his otherwise trembling body. Jon stares at the painted dismembered eyes in front of him. Out of the handful of paintings, why did he have to pick the martyr with gouged out eyes to use as his front door decoration?

Someone comes down the stairs and the floorboards of the stair landing creak such a low mournful sound.

_One._

_Two._

_“The body is not soiled unless the soul consents.”_

Jon’s breath hitches. 

An arm in long black sleeves, extending to a bone-white hand and knuckles whose eye tattoos seem to wink at Jon, slowly rises from out the corner of his eye. A long finger traces the swells of the gouged out eyes.

“Lucia of Syracuse. I was wondering what you’ve done with her.”

He does not touch Jon but he leans in close enough that the little hairs on Jon’s nape stand up, a multitude of tiny punctuation marks manifesting an impossible expectation.

“Did I scare you,” Gerry says, mouth barely inches away from Jon’s ear, “am I scaring you?”

Jon, a bad liar, badly lies, “ _No._ ”

* * *

Georgie’s fingers close around his, pressing them against the now lukewarm surface of his blue tea mug. He looks up from the screen of Melanie’s laptop to see her mouth curved in a familiar smile, the one that Jon would have once called pensive, melancholy even. He hated being the cause of that smile.

They’ve placed the laptops on the kitchen table and Melanie dozes peacefully on Jon’s right so Georgie settles on the chair at his left, her hand still on his. For a moment, he sees her gaze skitter at the screens, at the tiny boxes that display the rooms of Jon’s life for the past months. Melanie has explained the system to Jon, the different colours of the different aberrations, what the spikes in the graphs mean.

“Jon, promise me,” she says, her head bowed over their hands, her dark hair a thick curtain framing her face, “that whatever we see, whatever we _don’t_ see, tonight, you’ll- You’ll get help, that at least you will consider getting help?”

His fingers twitch inside her clasp and he withdraws from her completely. She looks up at him.

“I have you and Melanie.”

Something becomes adamantine in her eyes.

“ _Professional help._ ”

They had a conversation like this before with their positions reversed, the one that initiated the years of silence until Jon broke it by showing up at her doorstep with pristine white bandages hiding freshly healing scars. He had been so young then, so prideful, and she was a wall unyielding. She was right and so was he, but he understood now there are things more important than being right. It was a painful lesson to learn, but Jon learned it regardless.

He slots his hand with hers again and squeezes her fingers, letting his lips curl up for her. 

“I’ll- Of course, I’ll consider it, Georgie.” 

* * *

He wakes up in the dead of night, the little bar at the bottom of the laptop screen dutifully telling him it’s 00:05 hours. Pressing his palms against his face, Jon tries to pressure his drowsiness away. Failing that, he lowers his hands and blinks at the silver scars on his skin. They glisten under the pale glow of the screen and Jon thinks that if he squints he will see them move, see _them_ squirm gleefully inside him again.

Georgie and Melanie have pushed the other three chairs together into a makeshift half-bed, Melanie laying half on top of Georgie and both their legs dangling. Jon was supposed to wake Melanie up for her shift thirty-five minutes ago.

He decides against doing it, a heartbeat later of remembering. This is his fault, for overreacting like he did and now they’re both worried for him. A lot of things are Jon’s fault and most of them he cannot do anything about. Not this one, though. This time he can let them rest when they need to, when they want to.

A movement on the displays grabs his attention, a light wisp vaguely shaped like a man is waving directly at the camera positioned in the hallway and focused on the stairs. It points at the direction of the door. Heedless of all the warnings Melanie mentioned earlier about contaminating evidence, Jon clatters out of the kitchen and catches a glimpse of dark military boots at the last flight of the stairs before his focus is turned to the frosted glass door. To the figure just barely seen past the edges of The Saint’s frame.

Melanie hadn’t set her equipment up outside.

Like the hundred times he did it in the past, Jon walks the length from the threshold of the kitchen to the door, the old floorboards beneath his feet announcing his every step with a protesting sigh. 

The door is unlocked. 

The door is open.

Martin stands on the other side of the door, shoulder slouched and hands in his trousers pockets. A corner of his lips quirks up at the sight of Jon. 

“You really should start locking your doors, Jon.”

At Jon’s silence, gravity pulls at the corner of his lips, “ _He_ told me what happened, what’s happening.”

He breathes out, the fog rolling out of his lips thick and obscuring his face for a second before it disappears against the backdrop of the starless void above them..

“I thought I- just thought I wanted to be here. With you.”

Jon’s eyes map the freckles on his cheeks, the vibrant red of his hair. Martin had always had exquisite bone structure, Jon can admit that now. He wonders how he would have looked in Melanie’s cameras. Would he have been a faint outline of a person or something else?

_Does it matter?_

“ _Heh._ Not that it matters. I know you don’t-”

“You’re not Martin,” Jon says, hands tight in gripping the knob and the edge of the door.

He stops talking and a smile, melancholy Jon would have called it, flowers on his lips, “Not quite, not entirely.”

It hurts. 

Why does the truth hurt even when a larger part of him already knew it?

“His ghost, then?”

“...No.”

Jon remembers the things Gerry has been saying about him.

“A fragment?”

The man before him considers it for a moment, “A splinter, perhaps. He wanted to say something to you, I think.”

“Say what?”

Another smile, smaller. The man steps back from Jon and the angle of the streetlights and the trees cast impossible shadows on his face. He wonders if that’s how Martin looked when he一

“Would you come closer to me? He would have whispered it to you, if he ever got to tell you,” he answers and Jon has to strain to hear him, “Wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to know.”

“Whisper what?” Jon asks even as he follows the man’s steps, bringing his face closer to the other. The midnight air is freezing, the cold seeping through the threadbare shirt and Jon’s own skin to cut at his bones.

Softly, the man breathes before cupping Jon’s cheeks and leaning down toward his left ear. His skin is so _warm_ and the breath is choked in Jon’s throat.

Martin whispers, “ _Jon, I_ 一”

Static fills Jon’s ear.

* * *

(What does being a person even mean?)

* * *

This is a man, living (barely). 

Death touches him with butterfly kisses, always with someone else pushing him away or pulling him out of her embrace. Now, he’s at the funeral of another man he doesn’t understand at all and he stands back apart from what little crowd that gathered to pay their last respects to that other man lying in the silver casket. 

“We all felt it when he died,” they cry, “we all knew when he was lost.”

And the man knows they did. But he also knows that they’ll go on about their lives after this, that they’ll keep recording and researching their little horror stories, their academic research into the esoteric. 

Perhaps, he would have done so too, before.

A tap on his shoulder and he realised he's in front of the open grave, the sound of a crowd dispersing one by one behind him and the thunking of old shovels into moist dirt filling his ears. He breathes in, the scent of wet grass and petrichor in the air flowing in to push the panic out of his lungs.

"Thank you for coming." A cool, feminine voice. Rosie, probably.

He watches the dark earth fall onto the silver casket, somehow most of them landing in the centre. A growing clump of black voidlike against the white surface vignetted by the shadows of the still open pit. 

Accusing, it looks back at him. 

_Why are you still here?_

Another tap, fingers closing around his wrist, "Mr. Bouchard would have loved to see you here, Jon."

  
  
  


This is a man, dead (definitely). 

He knew he’s dead the moment his eyes opened and realised he’s looking down at his own body. He knew she had skinned him without seeing his back, knew that the book that once haunted him so was now being haunted too by another piece of him. He knew a lot of things without knowing the whys of his knowing. 

Perhaps, it was because he was scattered across many places why he knew so much. Not only as the flesh broken down to nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium which fed the grass above his grave and made them taller than the rest, but also as: a stray hair, accidentally pressed between the brittle pages of a book left in an unopened cupboard; a piece of yellowed skin, inked and cursed knowledge bound to serve; a drop of blood on the sidewalk, random and faded yet never washed off even by the rain; skin that has peeled off long ago, now innumerable dust floating in the air. Nail clippings, baby tooth, an umbilical cord preserved in a little bottle by a father hoping to show it to him one day, the list could go on and he wouldn’t be able to iterate the parts left of him.

But still. There remained a place which called to him, a pull his hovering feet could not resist. Each night, every night, beckoning each piece of him back. 

A house, a shop, an attachment. 

A place caught in the static of time until一

The man that walked up to the dark wood stained door of his mother’s bookshop was familiar only in the way a face seen on the streets permeated into one’s dreams was familiar. The man opened the door and the house stuttered in a fresh breath, crisp air into his lungs and suddenly all Gerry knew was that, finally, he _felt_.

  
  
  


This is a man, dying (slowly). 

There will be no hand holding his, no warmth embracing him as he life leaves him to his lonesome, no soft voice to cradle his consciousness into the darkness, only the cold wet walls of the tunnels and the echoes of the writhing things around him. He will wonder where the others are, hope they somehow impossibly made it out alive. Stupid, _so stupid_ , running ahead like that, why he did it he will never know. It will be on a loop in his head, the thought that he should have grabbed them all and ran, should have done a lot of other things too way before. Should have been a better son, should have never lied, should have said the things he wanted to say. 

But isn’t just the way of the world, the voice in his head will say, to know the words you need to say when the moment to say it passes you by.

Did he read that somewhere, he will wonder, it feels like it. 

_Hello_ , a new voice一wait no, voices in his head will say, _you’ve been so, so alone for so, so long. Lonely for so long. We come for you, come with us, you should come with us, you will never be lonely with us again, there is no room for that in our embrace, our multitudes of Love devours even the lonesomest of beasts, yes even the lonesomest, we will love you from skin to bones, come with us, we will sing together forever, together forever_ 一

His flesh will no longer be his alone. 

_Come with us and let us in, we make the doors as we see fit, you only need to leave them open, come with us, let us in, we long for you, do you not long for us?_

Love hurts, someone said, it would if it’s real. 

Is this real then? 

It hurts.

_Hurts, it does, but we sooth the hurts away. Love hurts the same way we hurt because we are all real. Let us in, come with us, become one with us, sing together, we were not meant to be alone, no hurt with us, come with us and let us in, we will still be here when the flesh fails and the mind rots, we are many, we are one, we are you, we are not meant to be alone, until the skeletons are left, come with us. Let us in._

Then a spark of a thought, one last hurrah for the voice that had been a singularity _before_.

_Let us in. We are you, and you are us. Let us in, let us in._

One last time, he一the one who was alone but will never be again一will think, just one last time for the fragile thing he locked in the cage of his heart before the masses come upon it, to that person there is still something Martin needs to say一

* * *

It yawns open before him, the door. 

Jon steps inside the house一his house, his library, his domain one can suppose一and the floorboards moan out its familiar reluctant welcome. A light flurry of snow sneaks in, following the tail end of his coat before he could push the door closed. The frame of Saint Lucia’s painting hits the frosted glass with a small thud. Jon looks up at her, at her eyes sitting on the pool of vermillion in the centre of the silver platter almost indiscernible from her pale fingers and sees that her picture has been hanging askew all this time. Just a little bit, just a little to the left. 

He adjusts the frame.

His eyes trail up from her portrait to the ceiling above, still clear, not even a dust mote seen despite Jon not being able to reach the ceiling when he dusts. He follows the line of ceiling, tracing the curlicues of the dark wood moulding until they end at the other side of the hallway. As always, the kitchen door is open and the cupboard under the stairs is closed. From his standing point, Jon can see a pot of tea brewing at the stove and at least two ceramics, mugs each ready with its own tea bag, waiting on the table. Like a punctuation to his observation, there’s a clatter upstairs and then a faint metallic click.

Heavy, deafening beats of a death metal song blares mid-lyrics. Slipknot, Jon decides, based on the way he can barely make out what was being sung.

_I will remember before I forget._

A thud, then another. 

His fingers grip the door’s latch. 

Jon inhales a long breath and holds it in. 

_One._

_Two._

_Three._

Then, he hears the laughter starting beneath the screams of the song. Two sets, a cycle of one responding to the other. 

A soft breath, something between a huff and a sigh bordering on relief and endearment, whooshes out of his lips.

Jon turns the door lock beneath his hand with a heavy click and starts going up the stairs.

* * *

This is not a story. 

It is a wandering, a haunting, an unravelling. 

Something about half-truths in the spaces left between words, or maybe about a purpose for living gone with a stuttered breath. 

Or perhaps it’s just the half-remembered fragments of a dream about love, unrecognisable in its skeletal form. 


End file.
